I decided I needed a blowtorch. The best was the Red Dragon 400,000 BTU Backpack Torch Kit with Squeeze Valve. It cost $284.95 online but came empty, so I’d have to pay to fill it with propane. I needed $300 to be safe.
I asked Ruthanne what kind of job I could get that would pay $300. Ruthanne said most places wouldn’t hire you until you were sixteen, but I was only almost fourteen. Ruthanne said she knew from experience.
“What kind of job did you try for?” I asked.
“Waiting tables,” she said.
“But you couldn’t lift the trays.”
“Could too. It’s not like I’m crippled.”
“Well you don’t lift nothing around here.”
“Around here I choose not to. It’s nonviolent protest. What do you want a job for anyway? You don’t even like girls.”
“Do too.”
“Well you don’t take ’em out on dates, and that’s what costs money.”
“It’s not like you go on dates, so why the hell do you want a job?”
“Not to blow up a trash pile, that’s for sure.”
“Fuck you,” I said, and went to my room. Ruthanne followed me, so I picked up The Highest Mountain by Bob Bilger, the only book in the room, and pretended to read it.
Ruthanne flopped down on my bed. “Whatcha reading?” she asked, even though she knew what I was reading. Every kid in Komer had to read The Highest Mountain, since Bob Bilger talked at school every year. Most kids thought he was boring but I thought he was okay. He had a big white beard and wore western jackets. He cursed on stage.
I tried to ignore her but Ruthanne persisted. “Which part are you on?” she asked, resting her chin on her fist. “The part where he videos the mountain, or the other part where he videos the mountain? Or, wait, the part where he pays some Sherpas to video the mountain?”
I shut the book and left the house, feeling like a fly whose sister was picking off its wings. The problem was Ruthanne was bored. Even though she was the most talkative person in the family, besides Dad, she was shy around other kids. She didn’t play sports because of her back, which wasn’t her fault, but she didn’t do band or yearbook or anything else either. After school she just slinked home, finished her homework in about fifteen minutes, then read one of her sleazy books or watched TV with Mom. She tormented Mom too. For instance, she might say, “Hey, Mom, Price is Right is on. Want me to turn it up full volume?” Mom would say sure, not really listening, and Ruthanne would do it. The TV would be rattling but Ruthanne would just be sitting there, watching, smiling kind of crazy, and when the host announced a new car or whatever, Ruthanne would announce it too, real loud, and do a crazy made-up song about the car until Mom told her to shut up so she could hear Price is Right.
Sometimes I thought if Ruthanne and I were combined into a sort of hybrid kid (not a hermaphrodite, though) we would be the most successful person ever to come out of Komer/Haislip, bigger than Bob Bilger even, or the lady who did the website where you could click on clothes TV people wore and buy them for yourself. Ruthanne and I might be the ones talking at schools about our exploits, such as floating down the Congo River in an oil drum or inventing the Kitchen Wizard, a space-age kitchen knife with a laser beam for a blade.
I cruised the city on my bike, brainstorming. I knew from movies that sometimes people put HELP WANTED signs in the windows, but the only signs I saw were for pit bull puppies. Dog breeding was an option, but pit bulls were where the money was, clearly, so I would have to catch a few stray pit bulls and make them have puppies. But the strays were scary, and I didn’t relish the idea of encouraging them to copulate.
On the window of the drugstore were flyers for paid drug trials, but you had to be eighteen to do them. There were also flyers offering money for blood plasma, but you had to be eighteen for that too, and anyway I had a notion that blood plasma was something only diseased people had, in place of normal liquid blood. I imagined it to be a sort of blood-colored mucus.
Thwarted, I decided to ask Demarcus for advice. He was a year ahead of me even though we were the same age, so he had started at Pansy Gilchrist, the high school, and had friends who were older.
Demarcus told me the best I could hope for were odd jobs like raking leaves for old people, but there were so few odd jobs in Haislip, he said, that for his own part he gave up long ago. “My Dad told me to start a paper route,” he said, “but who reads the newspaper anymore? Nobody in Haislip, that’s for sure. Maybe Komer’s different.”
“Probably not,” I said, “what with the internet.”
“Nobody in Haislip has the internet and they still don’t read that shit. As soon as I turn fifteen I’m gonna get a job bagging groceries. That’s good money, plus you get a discount on certain items.”
“But I don’t turn fifteen for a year.”
“Me neither.” Demarcus thought for a moment, which wrinkled his eyebrows together in a way that made him look older. “One time Dad let Daryl be a coat-check boy at the Motown Lounge.”
“What’s a coat-check boy?”
“A boy who holds your coat until you’re done drinking. Daryl says Dad didn’t let him stay up long enough to give people back their coats, though.” Demarcus shook his head. “Probably it would be best to invent something.”
“Like what?”
“Something everybody needs, like stronger cement that’s got a nice color to it, or tinfoil with self-cleaning nanoparticles. But to make money off it you gotta have a patent, so I’m thinking I might become a patent lawyer.”
“Don’t you have to go to college for that?”
“College and more.”
“What about until then?”
Demarcus thought for a moment. “You tried Bi-Cities?”
“What’s Bi-Cities?”
“Bi-Cities Sanitation and Recycling. The dump.”
“Hell no,” I said, kind of offended. A few months ago we had tried to blow the place up, and now Demarcus thought I should work there?
“It’s the only place that hires,” Demarcus said.
“I ain’t working for no dump.”
“It’s not just a dump, though. There’s a recycling center and a toxic waste storage facility.”
“No way.”
“Look, man, you said you needed work.”
The idea of working at the dump turned my stomach, but the more I thought about it, the more it made perverse sense. By working at the dump I’d accomplish two things at once: 1) getting money to torch the place later, and 2) casing the place so I could optimize the torching.
“Maybe you’re right,” I said, “but what kind of job could I get there?”
“There’s internships,” he said, “but you’d have to lie about your age. That, or gofer type jobs.”
I nodded. The idea of lying appealed to me. “Maybe I’ll try the dump after all,” I said. “Know your enemy, isn’t that what they say?”
Demarcus nodded seriously. “Let me know how it goes.”
I told Demarcus I would, and we shook hands in the elaborate way he favored.
It went horribly.
Bi-Cities headquarters was a squat gray office building that looked like a jailhouse. The building and its parking lot full of pickup trucks were surrounded by a razor-wire fence. The only entrance had a guard booth with tinted windows. I rode up to it on my bike. I was wearing a collared shirt and the pants from my funeral suit to look presentable. The guard was slouched, reading a magazine. It took him a while to notice me down below. When he did, he chuckled like a dimwit. He said, “Can I help you, little partner?”
The term little partner was distasteful to me but I smiled. “I’m interested in inquiring about employment opportunities,” I said, which was something I got off the internet at school, along with key phrases like “self-starter” and “team-player” and “I’m familiar with the work you do and consider myself an expert in your field.”
He chuckled again. “Any particular job posting you’re inquiring about?”<
br />
“The internship,” I lied.
“What internship?”
I hated this man. He had a stubbly red neck pinched by a starched collar, the sort of neck I would come to associate with thoughtless white men in positions of power.
“See,” he said, smiling as he put down his magazine to lift up a clipboard, “to get in you have to be on the list.”
“How do I get on the list?”
“You make an appointment.”
“I have one. They wanna interview me for the internship.”
“If you had one you’d be on the list.” He took up his magazine again, which was called POLICE: The Law Enforcement Magazine and had crosshairs on the O.
“There must be a mistake,” I said.
“I don’t think so,” he said.
“Can I use your phone?”
“Nope.”
I was kind of thankful he said no, because who would I have called? I didn’t have an interview. The rejection allowed me to take the higher ground, to save face as I rode away indignant.
As a last resort, I decided to talk to Dad. I had to wait until the weekend, though. He had taken a construction job in the city two hours away, where he shared a shitty little apartment with guys from work. He stayed there weeknights and got drunk, Mom said, and when he was home she barely talked to him. Neither did Ruthanne. Dad said we were lucky. He said there were dads from the Chinese countryside who lived in big cities all year, working 24/7, who only got to go home for Chinese New Year and by then they were so tired they just slept the whole time. Plus, he said, they often gave the rest of the family communicable city diseases.
When I approached him he was watching a TV news show. “Look at this goddamn idiot,” he said about an anchorman with gray hair like a helmet. “Bet he’s naked from the waist down behind that fake desk of his. That’s how they do, you know. The sports ones too. And when the cameras stop, they bitch and moan like Mickey Rooney.”
I asked Dad what kind of job I could get, and he said the first job he ever had was running errands for Donkey Dan Connors.
“You ran errands for a donkey?” I asked.
“A gangster,” Dad said. “A two-bit gangster. Whole family is gangsters, Whitey included.”
“Who’s Whitey?”
“Whitey Connors. He runs the dump.”
That was the first I ever heard about Whitey Connors, but the name stuck with me. I imagined a sort of godfather deep inside the Bi-Cities headquarters building, doing favors and putting out hits on people. I wouldn’t mind running errands for a person like that, I decided, but then I remembered he ran the dump so I cursed him in my heart.
I biked around the city looking for errands I could run, and odd jobs of the type Demarcus had described. Most of the downtown stores were closed, so I started at the fast food strip along the highway.
The cashiers seemed confused by my offer. They went to get their managers, and the managers said there wasn’t anything outside the store that anybody needed, not even office supplies. Everything was right there in the store. The manager at Burger Brothers said, “Burger Brothers is a completely self-contained replicable pod, which is why it’s such a successful—and delicious!—franchise burger establishment.”
I shifted my focus to non-burger establishments such as pawn shops and bank branches. People there were confused by me too. A lady at Komer United Credit Union said, “What does a little fella like you need a crummy old job for anyway?” which was a pretty stupid question. Everybody knew it was money that made the world go ‘round. I almost said something pathetic like “to eat, Miss,” but that would have been lying. We were poor, sure, but there was always cereal in the pantry, and macaroni, and a flaccid loaf of bread I could put peanut butter on. We had special big jars of Mormon peanut butter, which the Mormons made cheap for people in Guatemala or wherever, but also for people like us. It was kind of chalky and not very sweet but otherwise pretty decent peanut butter. I thought being Mormon wouldn’t be half bad if you got to work in a peanut butter factory and eat peanut butter all the time.
For inspiration I turned to The Highest Mountain. Bob Bilger was a mountaineer, after all; he climbed mountains, and I wanted to destroy a mountain. The first chapter was about Bob Bilger’s childhood in Haislip. He talked about his “dear sweet mother” and his father, “a monomaniac in the style of Long John Silver, who fine-tuned on his family the tyranny with which he cowed the simple-minded oafs on his road crew.” Then he talked about his boyhood pals, “a gang of true rascals,” but he didn’t mention anything bad they did. The only bad thing he mentioned, the thing that ended the chapter, actually, was how he lied about his age to an Army guy so he could go fight in Vietnam.
That gave me an idea: a thirteen-year-old, unlike a sixteen-year-old, had no driver’s license, which as far as I knew was the only means of identification a person could have, so why not just show up at the grocery store and claim to be fifteen?
That’s what I did. I approached the oldest looking checkout lady, hoping teens all looked the same to her, and sure enough she gave me a form to fill out. I lied about my birthday and put in a fake social security number, since I didn’t know it anyway. Under work experience I put “homework mostly.” Under why I wanted the job I wrote “money,” to sound honest, and also “to learn the value of hard work and possibly climb my way up to checkout, management, etc.” After I finished the application I gave it back to the checkout lady and asked to make an appointment to meet with the manager. The lady said they wouldn’t schedule an interview until they reviewed the application, to which I said that in the event they rejected my application I would cherish the opportunity to meet with them and learn what I could have done better on it. “Alright, alright,” she said, but I thought she might be lying so I made sure to read her nametag: NELDA.
Two days later somebody else from the grocery store called the house to tell me my application had been rejected and thanks for my time. Before she hung up I told her Nelda had promised me an interview.
“Nelda has no such authority,” she said.
“Please,” I said, “I know I’m out of the running for this position, but I sure would like to learn what I could do to strengthen my candidacy.”
“Persistent, aren’t you?” She told me I was welcome to come by the store and meet with her. She said she would give me some pointers.
The next day at school I had my funeral suit balled up in my backpack to meet with this lady, whose name was Darla Waddell, and I just couldn’t wait until three so I left at lunch. Maybe if Darla Waddell met me in person, I thought, she wouldn’t be able to resist giving me some kind of job. People told me I was a cute kid, or at least they told me that before my voice started changing. Ruthanne said my voice made me more creepy than cute, like the foulmouthed girl in that exorcism movie.
A checkout guy told me Darla Waddell’s office was in back, by the bathrooms, so I walked to the back of the store, which smelled like blood from the nearby meat counter. I knocked on a door marked OFFICE.
The woman who answered the door looked much younger than I expected. Her small face was dominated by heavy glasses, and she had long straight hair the color Mom called dishwater. She gestured to a chair across from her desk, which was cluttered with papers and a big dusty computer monitor. The windowless room was lined with big beige file cabinets covered in photos stuck in place by colorful magnets. The photos showed little kids.
“Cute kids,” I said.
“They aren’t mine,” she said. “Are you really fifteen?”
“Yes,” I lied.
She stared at me.
“Thirteen,” I said, cursing inwardly for giving it away so quick, “but in six days I’ll be fourteen. Swear to God.”
“Don’t swear to God in front of people.”
“Sorry, ma’am.”
“Don’t call women ma’am.”
“Okay.”
“That’s all the advice I can offer, I’m afraid. You seem like a sma
rt kid, though. Come back when you’re fifteen. And bring your social security card so you can write down your actual social security number.”
“Hmm, I meant to. I must have got a number wrong.”
“Your actual social security number has nine digits, not four. If social security numbers had four digits, that would mean there were fewer than ten thousand people in America.”
“How many are there?”
“Three hundred million.”
“No shit?”
“Don’t say shit.”
This lady was smart, I decided. Now I wanted a job there more than ever. “Are you sure there isn’t anything,” I said, “anything I can do? Off the books, maybe?”
“You mean illegally?”
“No, no, just, you know—”
“You can offer to carry people’s groceries, but you can’t do it in the store; we have people we pay to do that.”
“And you’ll pay me too?”
“No, but the customers might. It’s called tipping.”
“But if they don’t want their groceries carried inside the store, then why would they want them carried outside the store?”
“Exactly. And if we get any complaints, I’ll call security. Now, if you don’t mind, I have a one o’clock with my mother.”
She rose and we shook hands. Her handshake was firm, but she didn’t look into my eyes. It was like she felt bad for me or something.
When I left I wasn’t sure what to think. It seemed Darla Waddell had left the door open for me, but only a crack. I sat on my bike at the edge of the parking lot and scoped the scene.
Almost everybody carried their own groceries, either by hand or in shopping carts, so nobody needed help except really little old ladies who couldn’t get the bags from their carts into their trunks. I didn’t see any of the helpers Darla Waddell supposedly paid, so after watching for a while I got up the nerve to approach and old lady who was struggling to heft a bag out of her grocery cart. When I offered to help she seemed startled, but when she looked up and down at my wrinkly black suit she sort of grunted “alright.” I hefted the bag out of the cart into the trunk, then I did the other bags too. She said thanks but didn’t offer me money, so I stood there awkwardly until she said thanks again and got into her car in such a rush that she left her cart behind the car and backed into it before zigzagging into the street.
Trash Mountain Page 3